Faith Based Organizations

This technical brief illustrates the breadth of pre-service and in-service trainings offered by FBOs, with a focus on nursing and midwifery pre-service training in Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. [from introduction]

As the global community wrestles with human resources for health issues, faith-based organizations (FBOs) are a vital source of health worker production and promising practices. This brief describes how during the past five years the Capacity Project has worked to increase the number of countries in which FBOs are building national capacity in HRH. [adapted from author]

Current estimates indicate that between 30% and 70% of health care services in Africa are operated by faith-based organizations. However, these resources are not effectively integrated into national health information systems. While most partners providing health care in sub-Saharan Africa agree that FBOs play an important role in providing health services, there are few comprehensive data about the scope and scale of their contribution. This document details a project to collect facility location and personnel information to support the mapping and database development processes.

This document details the efforts of the Christian Health Association to strengthen sub-Saharan Africa’s national health sectors by mitigating the the HR shortage. [adapted from executive summary]

Traditionally, faith-based health organisations have been important health care providers in many remote and other under-serviced areas. Currently, these facilities bear the brunt of the competition for scarce human resources. It is important for faith-based organisations to learn from recent experiences and from the creative ways in which colleagues seek to retain their health workers and improve quality of human resource management. The accompanying guide contains case studies based on Quest for Quality for in-country discussion. [from preface]

This paper looks at the HRH crisis as experienced by the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau network giving the trend, examining the reasons, the destinations of attritional cases and what the network is trying to do to improve human resource stability. [from abstract]

This document explores some FBO health networks and facility-based services in Uganda and Tanzania. A pilot project in the Kasese District of Uganda illustrates how protestant, catholic and muslim health care providers and communities can work together from household-to-hospital levels to improve health outcomes. [from author]

Faith-based organizations are a key link in the sustainability of accessible health services. In many African countries, they have been providing health care for over 60 years and in some, such as Kenya, for a century or more.

Stigma and discrimination are widely recognized as factors that fuel the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Uganda’s success in combating HIV/AIDS has been attributed to a number of factors, including political, religious and societal engagement and openness – actors that combat stigma and assist prevention efforts. Our study aimed to explore perceptions of Uganda-based key decision-makers about the past, present and optimal future roles of FBOs in HIV/AIDS work, including actions to promote or dissuade stigma and discrimination. [from abstract]

This brief discusses Capacity’s experience with partnering with faith-based organizations (FBO), the critical role these organizations play in improving Africa’s health workforce and some challenges to working with FBOs.

This presentation was given as part of the Christian Health Association’s Conference: CHAs at a Crossroad Towards Achieving Health Millennium Development Goals. It provides an excellent overview of the challenges of Malaria and HIV/AIDS ; discusses the human resource needs in light of these challenges; and how to build and maintain capacity. [from author’s description]

This presentation was given as part of the Christian Health Association’s Conference: CHAs at a Crossroad Towards Achieving Health Millennium Development Goals. It discusses the human resources for health situation in Tanzania in general, and specific findings from the Lake zone in terms of health workers in church health institutions. The author proposes options for a motivation package to address the issues of retention for these workers.

This presentation was given as part of the Christian Health Association’s Conference: CHAs at a Crossroad Towards Achieving Health Millennium Development Goals. It introduces geographic information systems (GIS), human resource information systems (HRIS) and the Christian Social Services Commission (CSSC). It outlines the progress made in creating the systems, the benefits and reasons to have GIS and HRIS and presents the preliminary results in terms of health infrastructure, human resources and programs and interventions.

This presentation was given as part of the Christian Health Association’s Conference: CHAs at a Crossroad Towards Achieving Health Millennium Development Goals. It outlines FBO health services in Kenya and sources of and financial support for them. It also discusses the exodus of health workers from church health facilities, the reasons behind this migration and how this problem is being addressed.

This presentation was given as part of the Christian Health Association’s Conference: CHAs at a Crossroad Towards Achieving Health Millennium Development Goals. It discusses church health institutions and the HR crisis, including staffing levels and attrition; the national response, and details the many efforts of the CHAZ response such as the CHAZ Health Workers’ Retention Scheme.

This study documents the contribution made by religion and religious entities to the struggle for health and wellbeing in Zambia and Lesotho, in a context dominated by poverty, stressed public health systems and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. By mapping and understanding these Religious Health Assets (RHAs), the study calls for a greater appreciation of the potential they have for the struggle against HIV/AIDS and for universal access and offers recommendations for action by both public health and religious leaders at all levels. Through respectful engagement these assets have the potential to increase in strength and value and become more effective in the long-term sustainability, recovery and resilience of individuals, families and communities. [publisher’s description]

This study describes the work of the Choose to Care initiative of the Catholic Church in Southern Africa which began in 2000. It shows that effective scaling-up of programmes in the response to HIV does not necessarily have to be the expansion of a single central service. Working through the diocesan and parish system,…the Catholic Church scaled up service provision by the replication of smaller scale programmes rooted in and responsive to the needs expressed by local communities in this five-country area. This study shows that such an approach is effective when undertaken within common guidelines and given central support.

HIV/AIDS mainstreaming has traditionally been equated with adjusting programs to be more relevant to beneficiaries affected by HIV/AIDS. Bitter experience is demonstrating, however, that civil society organizations (CSOs) are not immune to the impacts of AIDS within their own organizations. Few local CSOs are responding adequately to this threat, partly because they simply do not know the extent of these costs. This paper suggests how CSOs in sub-Saharan Africa can build organizational resilience in order to survive the loss of valuable staff, time and money that HIV/AIDS will cause. It also concludes with practical recommendations for their donors in how they can move beyond being concerned bystanders. [publisher’s description]

Pathfinder has provided community-based family planning and reproductive health services to women and men throughout the developing world for over 50 years. Partnerships with local governments and Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) allow Pathfinder access into
communities to provide information and services. These local organizations provide a solid, established network through which Pathfinder reaches people. Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) are a vital extension of this network. [author’s description]


This report provides information on: the process of building relationships; partn

This presentation was part of the International Conference on Global Health session, “Answering the Call: Innovations in Human Resources by African Faith-Based Organizations.” From the perspective of the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau experience, the presentation discusses why the private not-for-profit sector is important in service provision and training; why nurses are in the midst of the human resource crisis; obastacles to increasing the training capacity; and what the PNFP health training institutions are doing to address their weaknesses. [adapted from author]

This presentation was part of the International Conference on Global Health session, “Answering the Call: Innovations in Human Resources by African Faith-Based Organizations.” It details several collaborative efforts between the MOH and various FBOs and the impact they have had on HRH in DR Congo.

This presentation was part of the International Conference on Global Health session, “Answering the Call: Innovations in Human Resources by African Faith-Based Organizations.” It introduces the Christian Health Association of Malawi and talks about the organizations effort in HR, recruitement strategies - including the impact and challenges of their strategy.

Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) Chogoria Hospital is a faith based non-governmental organization providing a wide range of healthcare services. The organization faces a number of challenges related to sustainability: declining donor support (especially for reproductive health services), low cost recovery levels, and increasing poverty levels among its clientele. In response to these concerns, a team from Chogoria Hospital attended a one-week workshop held in Ghana on financial sustainability and developed a small scale operations research project to determine the cost of providing a selected number of reproductive health (RH) services and to evaluate their cost recovery levels.

This report focuses on HIV/AIDS home and community care projects and programs that have been able to scale up or reach out, and in doing so have brought an improved quality of life to people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. The initiatives are widely spread geographically, with five from Africa, two from Asia, and one from Latin America. The final chapter of this report revisits some of the main lessons learned through the practices, and examines both commonalities and differences. [adapted from author]

[This case study evaluates the] Drug Resources Enhancement against AIDS and Malnutrition (DREAM) program, created by the Community of Sant’Egidio to fight AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. The project takes a holistic approach, combining Highly Active Anti- Retroviral Therapy (HAART) with the treatment of malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria, and sexually transmitted diseases. It also strongly emphasizes health education at all levels. DREAM aims to achieve its goals in line with the gold standard for HIV treatment and care. [author’s description]

GRHAM is a CCIH initiative, in collaboration with numerous partners, to increase the awareness of Faith-based Organizations (FBOs) in providing essential health services around the world. GRHAM strives to put FBOs and Christian Health Associations (CHAs) “on the map” to improve networking, including collaboration with and between christian health associations, medical missions, ministries of health and multilateral donors. [from website description]

The African Church Health Associations’ Human Resources for Health Mini-Forum was held to re-energize the CHA’s human resources working group. The objectives of the forum were to: expand the HRH knowledge base; help develop a critical mass of faith-based HRH advocates; clarify the “Terms of Reference” for an HRH working group and plan for sustainability and next steps; and to generate action plans for HRH practices and identify technical assistance needs. [adapted from author]

During the past few years, a number of key donor programs have scaled up their global response to the crisis of HIV and AIDS… The goal of this paper is to begin a discussion among donors, international and local NGOs, and multilateral and U.S. government representatives on how to effectively engage indigenous partners and transfer much-needed resources. [from preface]

This report presents the findings of an independent Technical Review that focused on the promotion of Public Private Partnership for equitable provision of quality health services in Tanzania. [author’s description]

This article documents the experiences of the Catholic health network in Uganda and its umbrella organization, the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau (UCMB) in making health services work for poor people. It demonstrates how the pro-poor ethos-derived from a longstanding tradition and the mission of “healing by treating and preventing diseases, with a preferential option for the less privileged”-supported by “soft” regulation and technical assistance from the umbrella organization can induce a process of change in a network of providers. [author’s description]